DRILLING OUT DINOSAURS.

Hawera Star, Volume XLV, 1 August 1925, Page 14

DRILLING OUT DINOSAURS.

D ARK AGE MONSTERS COME TO EIGHT.

In, the basement of the Natural History Musemn, South Kensington, are L’.'.i bone* which for mystery ami romantic, make Joanna SoLuheott’s boxes 'look like a joke.

Nobody in Phitain' knows what is in thorn yet. Only one man in the world knows what is in them, and he is: out in Tanganyika, anal has piobahly forgotten, for he us busy packing other boxes as quickly as lie, can.

The museum authorities have a rough idea, of course, for the boxes contain parts of dinosaurs, the, strange, almost brainless, monsters which lived in the world when the earth was comparatively young. I was present (writes a Daily News representative) when an unemotional liritish workman opened some of the rases, and revealed brown-paper-ami-sacking .parcels packed in straw ! They looked commonplace enough, but it was not commonplace to reali.se that one oi these parcels contained a, fragment- of a rib of a bea.st whose career came to an end .somewhere about millions of years ago.

Mr. W. E. Swill ton, of the geology department, told me that dinosaurs were hi>s pets. “We hope that from the pieces sent home by the expedition we may be able to reconstruct a- complete aninnd,’’ lie said. “Wo don’t know yet what treasures there may bo in these cases, and there are many others, on the way. Unfortunately all; this work which is of the first importance needs money and we haven’t, got very much.” fn another underground room 1 saw the “preparator” at work. He is a ■surgeon in stone. He works with an instrument like a dentist’s'drill. When the bones come to him they are embedded in stone which is called the matrix. With the needle point of his dentist's drill he had to clip away, fragment by fragment, all the stone winch Icicle* the buried treasure of bone.

One of his jobs ic nearing completion. Embedded in a mass of stone, the impression of the skin of an armoured dinosaur from America was found. It is several feet across, and there is only the faint discolouration of the skin to go upon. Yet the point- of the patient needle lias followed the elusive markings and revealed -some of the age-old secret.s of the stone. “It will he the finest skin impression in the world, ’ said the proparator. He wa>s once upon a time a stonemason and he knows all about the cutting of stone.

Down here in the cellars the real work of the museum goes on. What the public sees in the rooms upstairs m merely the result. The reason for the museum’s existence Is behind the Locked doors of the work rooms and studies. From, these secret rooms some day may come the complete reconstruction of the fierce', ungainly creature who inhabited the planet, before the coming of the mammals. Some of them were HO feet and more in height.